RSSFive9 – my first company
With 5 credit cards, $5k in the bank, and 1 smart engineer from Cisco – we started Five9.com. Ray Soto (Founding Engineer) moved from Boston with his then fiance and within a few months we had hired my first boss, Gus Laredo (who gave me my first job), and two more people from Cisco – James Southworth (Sales) and Andrew Veliath (CTO).
This core team holed up in my apartment in Alameda and a small office in Walnut Creek, and banged out some seriously industry shaking ideas and software. Back in 2004, no one wanted to invest in ASP software ventures, the dot bust had scared a lot of people, and “experts” told us “VoIP won’t work.” And we competed with Cisco and Avaya.
While most of us are no longer with the company that still lives in Pleasanton, CA, I’ll always have a special place in my heart for that company and the people I built it with. However, I don’t miss sleeping next to my phone…
A recent design of their messaging (not done by me)
